ONLY BUSH CAN SAVE EUROPE

Mark Steyn says that the US President’s ‘transformational’ response to Muslim fundamentalism can save the Old World; European ‘managerialism’ can’t

Last July, speaking to the United States Congress, the only assembly on the planet in which he’s still assured of a warm reception, Tony Blair remarked: ‘As Britain knows, all predominant power seems for a time invincible but, in fact, it is transient. The question is: What do you leave behind?’

Excellent question. Britannia will never again wield the unrivalled power she enjoyed at her imperial apogee, but the Britannic inheritance endures, to one degree or another, in many of the key regional players in the world today — Australia, India, South Africa — and in dozens of island statelets from the Caribbean to the Pacific. If China ever takes its place as an advanced nation, it will be because the People’s Republic learns more from British Hong Kong than Hong Kong learns from the Little Red Book. And of course the dominant power of our time derives its political character from 18th-century British subjects who took English ideas a little further than the mother country was willing to go.

A decade after victory in the Cold War and end-of-history triumphalism, the ‘what do you leave behind?’ question is more urgent than you might think. ‘The West’, as a concept, is dead, and the West, as a matter of demographic fact, is dying. On the first half of the question, whoever makes the late Osama bin Laden’s audio cassettes these days showed a shrewd understanding of the situation in offering a ‘truce’ to any European nation that distances itself from America. Hard to see how some of ’em could distance themselves from America any more short of relocating to Mars, but that’s the point. Though many commentators see the offer as a sign of al-Qa’eda’s weakness, the jihad boys are being rather cunning. Just because they’re insane death cultists doesn’t mean they don’t enjoy winding up Old Europe as much as Rumsfeld does.

September 11th: Within two months of attacking New York and Washington, the Americans have overthrown your pal Mullah Omar, your Afghan training camps are all closed down, and General Musharraf’s hitherto lethargic armed forces are harassing what’s left of your leadership all over Waziristan.

March 11th: Within one month of attacking Madrid, the Spaniards obligingly overthrow George Bush’s pal, European bigwigs start saying this terrorism business is really more about law enforcement than a ‘war’, and Mo Mowlam calls on Tony Blair to sit down to face-to-face negotiations with al-Qa’eda — preferably in London rather than Waziristan, so he’ll at least have a sporting chance of coming back alive.

And, as a bonus prize, it turns out (as Bruce Anderson noted last week) that a handful of timely Islamist bombs have done what all the Gallic hauteur of Giscard d’Estaing failed to do: eliminated the fiercest opposition to the absurd European constitution and thus made it a near certainty, which means that next time the hated Bush is looking for allies to attack a Muslim country he’ll have to pitch it to the ‘European Foreign Minister’ rather to than Tony Blair.

If that isn’t a productive ten minutes’ carnage, I don’t know what is. Given the dramatically different reactions to the Islamists’ transatlantic provocations, even the most doctrinaire jihadist can see there’s something to be said for muffling the death-to-all-infidels line in a bit of old-fashioned divide-and-conquer. As Mr Blair observed in that speech to Congress, ‘The political culture of Europe is inevitably rightly based on compromise.’ Al-Qa’eda’s PR department is learning how to talk to continentals in a language they can understand.

Most European politicians see Islamist terrorism as a managerial problem. After September 11th, George W. Bush opted to approach it transformationally. Around the world Islam is expanding, and around the Islamic world a radicalised form of Islam is expanding. Bush determined to tackle the problem at source: he decided — as I heard Condi Rice say last week at the US Naval Academy — to turn the map of the Middle East ‘upside down’. He would bring liberty to a region that had never known it. The Spectator thinks this is a mug’s game, and its editorial had some sport with the forthcoming Iraqi election: ‘Men and women with large rosettes and wide grins will be walking the streets, kissing babies and expounding on their plans for schools and hospitals. Thereafter, the members for Baghdad South and Basra Central will engage in raucous but civilised debate over the sale of council allotments and the merits of congestion charging.’

First, the Honourable Members for Baghdad South and Basra Central evidently sound pretty funny to my colleagues, but why are they inherently more hilarious than, say, the Honourable Members for Kandep (Mr Jimson Sauk, CMG, former minister for police) and Kairuku-Hiri (Sir Moi Avei, minister for petroleum and energy) in the Papua New Guinea parliament? All over the world people manage to practise Westminster democracy despite a shocking dearth of Old Etonians to put up for the nominating committees.

Which brings me to my second point: those who mock Bush’s ambitions for Iraq and beyond seem to imply that there’s something about Arab Islam that makes it uniquely inimical to freedom. They may be right. But, if so, that makes it a pressing problem not for Iraq but, giving current demographic trends, for Western Europe right now.

The editor of this magazine recently described an encounter he’d had with a ten-year-old girl who was distraught because Tony Blair was going around telling anyone who still listens that we were all in ‘mortal peril’. I think we can all agree that there’s no point going around scaring schoolgirls, except on Hallowe’en when I like to dress up as Justin Timberlake.

Nevertheless, as Bill Clinton used to say, it’s about the future of all our children. Admittedly the former president was a little bit indiscriminate with this expression, applying it to the Highway Appropriations Bill and the mohair subsidy and the necessity for him to be able to have non-sexual relations with various parties without folks impeaching him for it. But for once it really is about the future of all our children. Picture that ten-year-old schoolgirl when she’s the age Boris is now — sometime in the 2030s, say.

What will London — or Paris, or Amsterdam (for she is after all a citizen of the European Union) — be like in the mid-Thirties? On present demographic projections, it will be far more Muslim — how far depends on whether European politicians make any serious attempt this decade to wean the populace off their unsustainable 35-hour weeks, etc. If they make no attempt at all, then to keep the present level of pensions and health benefits the EU will need to import so many workers from North Africa and the Middle East that it will be well on its way to majority Muslim by 2035. Can a society become increasingly Islamic in its demographic character without becoming increasingly Islamic in its political character?

A few weeks back I was strolling along the Boulevard de Maisonneuve in Montreal when I saw a Muslim woman across the street, all in black, covered head to toe, the full hejab. She was passing a condom boutique, its window filled with various revolting novelty prophylactics, ‘cum rags’, etc. It was a perfect snapshot of the internal contradictions of multicultural diversity. In 30 years’ time, either the Arab lady will still be there, or the condom store, but not both. Which would you bet on?

This is where, I regret to say, the recent Spectator leader ‘We are not at war’ (3 April), managed to go hopelessly awry. It stated confidently: ‘Osama bin Laden is no more likely to march triumphantly down the Mall than is a little green man from Mars. Al-Qa’eda has means but no end.’ Well, no, Osama won’t be going down the Mall, unless it’s his surviving granules of DNA on a gun carriage. But al-Qa’eda’s end — the Islamification of the West — is shared by millions of law-abiding Muslims. Only a tiny minority are prepared to go out and blow up trains to that end, but they move among communities that are broadly supportive of the goal.

The other day, Sheikh Omar Bakri Muhammad told Lisbon’s Publica magazine that a group of London Islamists are ‘ready to launch a big operation’ on British soil. ‘We don’t make a distinction between civilians and non-civilians, innocents and non-innocents,’ he said, clarifying the ground rules. ‘Only between Muslims and unbelievers. And the life of an unbeliever has no value.’ The cleric added he expected to see the banner of Islam flying in Downing Street. ‘I believe one day that is going to happen. Because this is my country, I like living here,’ he said. ‘If they believe in democracy, who are they afraid of? Let Omar Bakri benefit from democracy!’

This is becoming a common line. The other day, who should show up at the airport in Toronto but the son and widow of Ahmed Said Khadr, known as ‘al-Kanadi’ because he was the highest-ranking Canuck in al-Qa’eda. One of Pop Khadr’s sons was captured in Afghanistan after killing a US Special Forces medic. Another has just been released from Guantanamo. Another blew himself up while killing a Canadian soldier in Kabul. Pop Khadr died in an al-Qa’eda shoot-out with Pakistani forces a few weeks back, in the course of which his youngest son was paralysed. So Mrs Khadr and her boy have now returned to Canada so he can enjoy the benefits of Ontario healthcare. ‘I’m Canadian, and I’m not begging for my rights,’ she declared. ‘I’m demanding my rights.’

Treason’s hard to prove in court, but given the circumstances of Mr Khadr’s death it seems clear that he had taken up with what we used quaintly to call the Queen’s enemies. Nonetheless, the Prime Minister of Canada thought this was an excellent opportunity to demonstrate his deep personal commitment to ‘diversity’. Asked about the Khadrs’ return to Toronto, he said, ‘I believe that once you are a Canadian citizen, you have the right to your own views and to disagree.’ That’s the wonderful thing about multiculturalism: you can choose what side of the war you want to fight on. Just tick ‘home team’ or ‘enemy’ when the draft card arrives. Like many enlightened Western leaders, the Canadian Prime Minister will be congratulating himself on his boundless tolerance even as the forces of intolerance consume him.

Even Mr Bush is somewhat constrained. National Review’s John Derbyshire wrote last week about a ‘1945 solution’ for Iraq. This is shorthand for the bombing of Dresden, the nuking of Hiroshima, etc. — the sort of stern measures that let an enemy know he’s well and truly whipped. But, as Mr Derbyshire points out, war abroad is determined by culture at home, and if we were fighting the second world war today, we wouldn’t nuke Hiroshima or even intern Japanese-Americans: the culture will not permit it. Nor will it permit old-school imperialism. Culturally sensitive nation-building is as aggressive as you can get these days. So Bush has gone for the only big-picture scenario available.

The Bush ‘transformational’ approach to terrorism may fail. The EU ‘managerial’ approach certainly will. It’s fine for small, contained, stable populations like Ulster, Corsica or the Basque country. But not for the primal demographic forces sweeping the Continent.

Last week Niall Ferguson called me ‘the Pangloss of Republican humourists’. I wish I was. But I’m not at all Panglossian these days, and I was interested to see that Ferguson, in a recent speech, has become a somewhat belated convert to the Eurabian scenario I’ve been peddling in these pages for a couple of years now. Perhaps he’ll have better luck with it than I’ve had. Meanwhile, in the current issue of Fortune, Philip Longman, author of The Empty Cradle, is even more apocalyptic: ‘So where will the children of the future come from? Increasingly they will come from people who are at odds with the modern world,’ he writes. ‘Such a trend, if sustained, could drive human culture off its current market-driven, individualistic, modernist course, gradually creating an antimarket culture dominated by fundamentalism — a new Dark Ages.’ That ten-year-old girl could have a lot more to worry about than gloomy Blair speeches.

‘What do you leave behind?’ asked the Prime Minister. There will only be very few and very old ethnic Germans and French and Italians by the mid-point of this century. What will they leave behind? Territories that happen to bear their names and keep up some of the old buildings, in the way that the great cathedral of St Sophia in Constantinople is now a museum run by the Turkish government? Or will the dying European races understand that the only legacy that matters is whether the peoples who will live in those lands after them are reconciled to pluralist, liberal democracy? The Bush vision is the best shot.

"You are right. The muslim world is NOT Nazi Germany. However, if Hitler could have conceived of the 72-virgins-in-paradise ruse and foisted it on his military, the outcome of the war may have been different."

Hitler himself regretted being raised Christian and hated that Christian culture was so 'weak' in its compassion and marvelled at how useful Mohammed's creed was in creating political-national will.

Hitler himself regretted being raised Christian and hated that Christian culture was so 'weak' in its compassion and marvelled at how useful Mohammed's creed was in creating political-national will.

We actually agree on something? Hitler was even more cynical. Himmler was the one who advocated a renewed belief in old Germanic and Nordic pagen "War Gods" to his SS while Hitler scoffed at all religious belief but did believe in personal "providence" or "fate".

But in general Christianity was not loved by Nazi ideology.

How and why?

The how and the why are the same.

Because they believe.

They believe that our culture is evil and is a threat to theirs.

They believe that their religion demands that they conquer our culture and convert us to their faith by force if necessary and by whatever means necessary.

They believe that dying in the defense of their faith is a free trip to paradise regardless of any sin they may have committed.

Such faith is a great motivator for a soldier.

If a soldier if fearless in the face of certain death, if he is willing to die to achieve his goal, how do you stop him (especially when you have no fronts and the enemy does not wear a uniform)? If you have even a small army of such dedicated well-trained warriors you can do great damage to much larger foe.

You really don't think part of the Muslim world is not a threat to on non-muslim lives? Why? Arafat himself has said there is no such thing as peace only temporary cease fire.

No. The Muslim extremist are as evil as the Nazis. They want to destroy people they have deemed as "evil".

What they "manufacture" is hate and and the commodity they use is human life.

It's a far different war than America has ever seen before but we are still at war.

Why do you chose to ignore the constant Muslim drumbeat "Death to infidels" Were you in a comma on 9-11? If not what color is your wifes burka?

They are the enemy. We are at war.

I think it was P. J. O'Rouke that said something like you can bury your head in the sand, put a burka on your butt and they will still kill you.

Again we are at war with an enemy that has no problem with wiping out the innocent. That's about as evil as you can get.

It had nothing to do with fricken oil, it had everything to do with fighting for our lives

How many Islamic armies occupy our land or any Christian land right now (other than Serbia since "those Moslems" are on "our side"!?

How many Islamic Aircraft carriers are parked off our coast right now?

How many bases do Islamic countries have in the Western Hemisphere?

How many Christian dictators do the Oil rich Moslems support in our lands that oppress us?

So it is just their religion? Nothing to do with our policies one bit?

The problem here is that those, like yourselves, who are against the war have no plan for dealing with the mad Moslem who packs a suitcase nuke intended to level a US city or an anthrax vial intended to kill Americans in large numbers. These Moslem monsters, who represent the dreck from a decrepit, degenerate society, have been murdering Americans for forty years with impunity. They've already been targeting us, and will continue to do so, unless forced to stop. The "moderate" Moslems, if there even is such a creature, have shown that they have neither the will or the wherewithall to police their own neighborhoods. Those of us, like yourselves, who are blind to this reality may wish it were otherwise, but these monsters aren't going to stop just because your ilk would bend over for their depradations. In the spirit of good will and peace, of course.

Thank God we have a president who understands these dangers and is doing something proactive to deter the threat. Which, like it or not, is real and serious. And don't try to hide behind some sort of "libertarian" bullshit that obfuscates the truth of this problem. Those who adhere to your way of thinking are no better than America-hating Democrats. You all have a death wish!

Thanks- nice post.

Our culture and our country can be attacked any number of ways. The commies tried infiltration and subversion in addition to military aggression and totalitarianism. The Islamics know they cannot defeat us on the battlefield. But they use our cultural strengths against us. They relocate, multiply and their plan is to vote themselves into power. Europe is in serious trouble demographically, I read once (but cannot source it) that over 50% of the children under 10 in the Netherlands are Muslim.

If Muslims were the majority, or gained the majority in a western country, how long before the law of the land became Sharia?

Perhaps Christians also do the same, but would you rather be ruled by a majority of Christians or a majority of Islamics?

Cultural decay is a major issue, the Islamics know this and are exploiting our multicultural attitudes to achieve their ends. I agree and would like to see our political leadership do better job in defining what we are and promoting this to the people.

I share your concern about fighting Islam, it is a war we cannot win. But the Islamics have made themselves a threat and our fundamental way of life is at risk. How do we defeat them?

I BELIEVE THE QUESTION WAS;

And yet this part of the world is a "threat" to us?

They do not need to be a great military power to be a threat to us.

The Germanic Barbarians were an insignificant military threat to the Roman Empire yet they brought down the Romans. Did Roman civilization’s decay have something to do with it? Yes.

But does that discount the fact that the Barbarians were a threat? NO.

And yet we waste our resources in these fruitless invasions and empire builing?

A. We don't know if Iraq and Afghanistan are fruitless invasions or not -- it is a long term strategy and the results are not clear yet. B. It is not "empire building" -- the US has no desire to conquer territory (or oil), but to create a better (and hopefully safer for us in the long run) Middle East.

The time has come again to take on a runaway religion and culture. With force. Brutal force.

The religion should be outlawed on the planet if it can't be controlled and sedated.

Islam needs a pope.

Cut the swill.

The population of western europe is decreasing for the same reason the white population of the usa is.

People(women) are too worried about getting ahead and establishing their careers and putting off childbearing until they can afford it.

I have been eurotrash now for nearly 20 years and all that welfare is to try to give people some security so they will have kids. It appears that it is working in Norway where birthrates are replacement. If you are sitting in an unemployment line who wants a house full of kids to feed to add to your woes.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.